Breasts and Eggs

People like pretty things. When you’re pretty, everybody wants to look at you, they want to touch you. I wanted that for myself. Prettiness means value. But some people never experience that personally. I was young once, but I was never pretty. When something isn’t there, inside or out, how are you supposed to seek it out? Pretty faces, gorgeous sk

Once you get your period, that means your body can fertilize sperm. And that means you can get pregnant. And then we get more people, thinking and eating and filling up the world. It’s overwhelming. I get a little depressed just thinking about it. I’ll never do it. I’ll never have children. Ever. —Midoriko

Worst part is, there’s a good chance that you’ll get used to the constant pain just as the chemicals stop working their magic. Anyway, yeah, I had to stop. Three months was all I could take. I looked at my nipples, and somehow convinced myself that they were going to stay like that. Like, what if I was the exception, the only person on earth who co

No breathing room between the buildings, which means unagi restaurants rubbing shoulders with telephone clubs, and estate agents sharing walls with sex shops. Busy electric signage and pachinko parlors waving banners. Seal-engraving businesses whose owners never bothered coming in. Video arcades that looked anything but fun.

After we had that other fight, the big one, it hit me. It was because of her job. It all started when she was riding on her bike, in that stupid purple dress she wears for work, the one with the gold fringe, and a boy from my class saw her and made fun of her in front of everybody. I wanted to say shut up or I’ll make you shut up, but all I could d

She reminded me of Mum. I couldn’t tell if it was just in the way that daughters start to look like their mothers over time, or if the things that happened to Mum’s body were happening to her now, too.

We grew up on the third floor of a little apartment building near the ocean. Just two rooms, one more cramped than the other, no wall or anything between them. Izakaya on the ground floor.

Then she pulled a notebook from her bum bag and wrote [Whose plant is this?]. Her writing was oddly thick, pushed hard into the paper, like something etched in stone.

One thing I remember is lying to the factory about my age every vacation, spring, summer and winter, all three years of middle school. The soldering irons hanging from the ceiling, and the hiss of sparks. Huge heaps of folded cardboard boxes. Most of what I remember from back then is from the bar. A little place run by a friend of my mum. Mum worke